France: National Card in Play?

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Toulouse school shooting: same gun was used in killing of soldiers

Gun fired in Ozar Hatorah secondary college tragedy was weapon used in fatal attack on three French troops, police say


A gun used in a shooting at a Jewish school in south-west France was the same weapon used in the shooting dead of three French soldiers last week, police sources have said.

Four people, including a father and his two sons and another child, were killed at the Toulouse school on Monday. Reuters reported that French police were linking the attack with the shooting of the soldiers in Toulouse and nearby Montauban.

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had said there were "similarities" between the two attacks.

Speaking in Toulouse, he said: "We are struck by the similarities between the modus operandi of today's drama and those last week, even if we have to wait to have more elements from the police to confirm this hypothesis."

The soldiers who were shot were of north African and Caribbean origin. Two of them were Muslims.

The adult victim in the most recent shooting was thought to be a rabbi who taught at the school, who died with his three-year-old and six-year-old sons. The fourth victim, aged between eight and 10 years old, was the school principal's daughter, according to Rahamim Sabag, a rabbi who works at the school, who spoke to Israeli television.

Witnesses described how the gunman entered the Ozar Hatorah school, a private Jewish secondary, at around 8.15am and opened fire on "everything that moved". He pursued some children, including a girl whose hair he reportedly pulled. He then fled through the quiet residential neighbourhood on a motorbike.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012...-jewish-school


Not so bleu: Attack on EU immigration policies gives Sarkozy a much-needed election boost

By Peter Allen In Paris

Nicolas Sarkozy has bounced back in the French presidential election polls after launching an attack on European Union immigration policies.

With the first of two rounds of voting due to take place on April 22, it is a morale boost for the current president who has been widely predicted to lose.

In the poll, 28.5 per cent of voters said they would back him in the first round, with 27 per cent opting for his main rival, Socialist Francois Hollande.

As in the 2007 presidential election, Mr Sarkozy is trying to woo Right-wing supporters by hammering away on immigration, security and trade protection.

During recent campaign speeches he has also demanded greater protection of Europe’s internal borders and threatened to pull out of the Schengen agreement, which allows passport-free movement between most European Union nations, in a bid to almost halve the number of immigrants arriving in France.

However, Mr Sarkozy’s threats yesterday pushed Germany to issue a public rebuke, in a sign of growing concern in Berlin with the tone of his re-election campaign.

But such tough words appeal to traditional followers of France’s Right-wing National Front (FN) party, led by Marine Le Pen, many of whom are believed to have switched to Mr Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...#ixzz1paLnu9on

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Re: France: National Card in Play?

French Police Say They Have Cornered Suspect in School Shooting

By SCOTT SAYARE

TOULOUSE, France — Hundreds of police officers surrounded a small apartment building in Toulouse early on Wednesday and were negotiating with a 24-year-old man suspected in the methodical killings of seven unarmed people in the past ten days, including three young children.

The man claimed to belong to Al Qaeda, telling negotiators the attacks were meant to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and to protest French military deployments abroad, according to Interior Minister Claude Guéant, who was at the site of the raid on Wednesday morning.

Investigators believe the man, identified as Mohammed Merah, a French national from Toulouse, to be behind the shooting deaths of three French paratroopers as well as an attack on Monday outside a nearby Jewish school that killed a rabbi and three children. Mr. Merah fired several heavy volleys at security forces ringing the five-floor apartment building in which he had barricaded himself, about two miles south of the school. Two officers were slightly wounded, Mr. Guéant said.

As the standoff stretched past 11 hours, The Associated Press reported that Cedric Delage, regional secretary for a police union, said the suspect has promised to turn himself into police and that if he did not, the police would attempt to arrest him by force.

Mr. Merah had traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan and called himself a mujahedeen, or freedom fighter, Mr. Guéant said, and had been under surveillance by the French domestic intelligence service for several years, “though nothing whatsoever allowed us to think he was at the point of committing a criminal act.” A senior Pakistani official said that intelligence services there had no information on whether the suspect had visited Pakistan.

Only after the attack on the Jewish school on Monday did investigators come to suspect Mr. Merah, though those killings did not provide evidence that led authorities to him, according to Pierre-Henry Brandet, a spokesman for Mr. Guéant. Rather, on Monday afternoon, investigators traced an IP address used in connection with the first killing, ten days ago, to Mr. Merah’s mother, and began to suspect his involvement.

Only after the attack on the Jewish school on Monday did investigators come to view him as the principal suspect, Mr. Guéant said.

Aviv Zonabend, the vice president of the local branch of the Crif, France’s most prominent Jewish organization, who met with Mr. Guéant on Wednesday morning, gave a slightly different account, saying that investigators apparently had been unable to locate the suspect before the shootings on Monday.

The killings of the paratroopers, who were shot in two separate incidents in Toulouse and the nearby city of Montauban, apparently were not linked to their ethnic backgrounds, Mr. Guéant said. Two of the victims were of Arab origin and one was black.

Police officials negotiating with the suspect brought his mother to the residence in the hope she would help persuade him to surrender, but she declined to speak to the suspect, Mr. Guéant said, adding that her son refused to listen to her in the past. The suspect’s brother, who was known locally for his radical religious ideology, was detained for questioning outside Toulouse on Monday, Mr. Guéant said, without giving details.

Investigators said the suspect’s first name was Mohammed, according to Mr. Zonabend, and French media have identified him as Mohammed Merah, but officials have not confirmed that.

A representative of the police union, Didier Martinez, said about 300 officers had been deployed in Wednesday’s operation. Several hours after the siege began, French media reports said police negotiators were talking to the suspect through a door.
The police action, which started at about 3 a.m. on Wednesday and was continuing nine hours later, came after lengthy planning late Tuesday night, officials said.

Earlier on Tuesday, authorities had offered new details on the killings at the Jewish school, an assault that has stunned the nation and terrorized Toulouse. They said the gunman seemed to be filming his actions as he coolly shot his victims. Mr. Guéant said surveillance footage from the school’s security cameras showed what appeared to be a video camera strapped to his chest.

Monday’s attack was quickly linked to the two earlier shootings of the French paratroopers, with the police saying that the same gun, a .45-caliber automatic pistol, was used in all three assaults. The authorities have also said that the methods were the same: a man on a powerful motorbike, also the same in each instance, who killed and then fled.

President Nicolas Sarkozy called the shooting a “national tragedy” and ordered a minute’s silence at schools across France on Tuesday. Mr. Sarkozy will preside over a funeral service in Montauban on Wednesday for the three soldiers killed in the earlier attacks.

The French leader had ordered the region’s security alert to “scarlet” — its highest level — for the manhunt. That is one step short of a formal state of emergency, giving security forces wide powers that include the authority to close some public places, halt and search public transportation networks and to deploy combined patrols of police officers and soldiers.

Police were ordered to guard Muslim and Jewish schools and places of worship across the region.

Before the authorities said on Wednesday that their prime suspect claimed ties to Al Qaeda, many analysts had speculated on whether he was motivated by extreme right-wing passions coinciding with the presidential elections.

After the shootings on Monday, the candidates suspended their campaigns as political debate swirled around whether the killings were somehow inspired by anti-immigrant issues in a long and heated campaign when President Sarkozy is trying to win back voters who drifted to the far-right National Front party.

But the suspect’s apparent links to Al Qaeda seemed likely to shift that debate onto familiar themes, also associated with Mr. Sarkozy, of law and order and the fight against terrorism, particularly if the authorities are able to end the crisis with arrest of the suspect, removing the immediate threat of further bloodletting. It remained unclear how the killings may affect the election, which is only weeks away. Nor was it clear if they will stoke anti-Muslim rhetoric among some politicians and voters — Muslims complain widely of feeling vilified by some elements, on the right in particular, and the anti-immigration far right has been gaining unprecedented popularity in recent months. It is also possible the deaths could cause a calming of the political discourse.

President Nicolas Sarkozy met with Jewish and Muslim leaders in Paris on Wednesday morning and called for restraint and solidarity among the populace. “We must be united,” he said in a brief address. “We must yield neither to easy falsehoods nor to vengeance.”

Before meeting with Mr. Sarkozy, Richard Prasquier, the national head of Crif, the Jewish organization, said: “It is absolutely excluded that we confuse this character — and the Islamist, jihadist, Al -Qaeda-linked movement he represents — and the Islam of France, which is a religion like all other religions.”

“These acts are in total contradiction with the foundations of this religion,” said Mohammed Moussaoui, the president of the French Council for the Muslim Faith, who also met with Mr. Sarkozy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/wo...ef=global-home